After the Flood IIII (ongoing series), 2024, Megan Cope, Biennale of Sydney, UNSW Galleries, NSW. Acrylic and ink, military maps, cotton rag mounted on board. 3m x 2m (comprised of 8 x 750mm x 1000mm panels). Image courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane. Photo: Carl Warner.
After the Flood IIII (ongoing series), 2024, Megan Cope, Biennale of Sydney, UNSW Galleries, NSW. Acrylic and ink, military maps, cotton rag mounted on board. 3m x 2m (comprised of 8 x 750mm x 1000mm panels). Image courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane. Photo: Jacquie Manning.
After the Flood IIII (ongoing series), 2024, Megan Cope, Biennale of Sydney, UNSW Galleries, NSW. Acrylic and ink, military maps, cotton rag mounted on board. 3m x 2m (comprised of 8 x 750mm x 1000mm panels). Image courtesy of Biennale of Sydney, NSW. Photo: Daniel Boud.
After the Flood IIII (ongoing series)
as part of the 24th Biennale of Sydney.
People of the Sand and Sea (Yoolooburrabee), the Quandamooka community have lived in Moreton Bay across the archipelago of islands including Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island) for over 25,000.
Disrupting concepts of time and geography, Quandamooka Artist Megan Cope works over Military Maps that recall the myth of Terra Nullius.
Her ongoing series "After the Flood" weaves social, geographical and metaphysical stories and reclaiming landscapes with future tide lines of 5 meter sea-level rise and replacing colonial titles with those of her people's Jandai language. Each map, glowing with crystalline blue tides, returns cultural layers and memory over landmarks and places renewed with dual history and shared sense of place.
An act of decolonial cartography, at a time when entire lands and peoples across the earth are being reconfigured by climate change with Quandamooka Country itself also vulnerable, Copes work is both a remembering of the past, a steadfast endurance of the apocalypse, a reimagining of currents and future islands.
EXHIBITION HISTORY
24th Biennale of Sydney, UNSW Galleries, NSW.
PRESS
Interview with Megan Cope: On the role of art in restoration, reclamation and rebirth
The Sydney Biennale is coming to a close. Here's some mob to see before it does.
After the Flood IIII (ongoing series), 2024, Megan Cope, Biennale of Sydney, UNSW Galleries, NSW. Acrylic and ink, military maps, cotton rag mounted on board. 3m x 2m (comprised of 8 x 750mm x 1000mm panels). Image courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane. Photo: Jacquie Manning.